proceduraldialectics posted:

Can anyone help explain what is going on?

The cause of the explosion appears to be a large cache of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that was in a warehouse at the port. The fertilizer had been removed from a cargo ship that had mechanical problems and docked there a couple of years ago. The ship was abandoned by the owners and the whole thing dragged on as random bureaucrats and legal clerks shuffled around paper about it. For whatever reason, that warehouse caught fire (alleged a shipment of fireworks sparked off) and that started a reaction which caused the fertilizer to explode. The fire burned for a while, so people were looking in the direction, and the sheer quantity of the fertilizer piled up in one place created a supersonic blast wave that was invisible once the water vapor dispersed and silent until it passed.

The western media is blaming Lebanese "incompetence" but this is a cover for their own systematic incompetence which created the conditions to put Beirut in this situation. This was an international bureaucracy and capitalist failure which just happened to manifest the consequences upon the innocent people of Lebabon.

The ocean-going cargo ship was flagged to Moldova, a landlocked country with one tiny shipping port on a river 100 km inland from the sea. The ship was flagged there for tax and inspection evasion purposes. The coast guard of your "home" country can never inspect your boat and order things repaired if you never dock there. This lack of inspection may have contributed to whatever the issue was that forced it to port. Most cargo ships are registered to tax shelters like this, Liberia, Bahamas, Panama, etc. are all popular.

The cargo was just a simple shipment of fertilizer from Georgia (the Stalin one not the Klan one) to Mozambique in 2014. The ship had some kind of emergency issue and had to dock someplace, and that place turned out to be Beirut for whatever reason. There's not many major ports around that area, they may have just had the most suitable dock space open to the travelers. The zionists were probably closed to providing assistance to needy people, so it looks like the only other options for a struggling ship in that area of the med would be Limassol Cyprus, or Alexandria or Port Said Egypt. They may have been full, or had immigration/diplomatic issues, or cost too much, or the ship just couldn't get there.

Once the ship was docked in Beirut and inspected, the owners decided it was not economical to repair, and abandoned the ship, cargo, and crew. Some of the crew were repatriated and some had to sit there on the failing ship for a while in legal limbo because of immigration clearance issues. The cargo was removed to the warehouse and sat there while Lebanon had to figure out wtf to do with these dudes, their boat, and the fertilizer.

So first the Lebanese had to determine who legally owned each separate piece of this mess, then communicate with the responsible companies and countries, then wait for them to respond or not. The shipper was probably most legally responsible but decided they didn't give a shit about a rust bucket with some fertilizer and may possibly have just dissolved and gone dark. Mozambique lost interest in the fertilizer because the seasons continued to turn and they probably just bought some from someplace else and considered it a dropped shipment or a scam like happens to the global south all the time. The fertilizer plant in Georgia obviously didn't want to pay for it to be shipped back. The Lebanese couldn't seize it and distribute it to their farmers or dispose of it without going through the international legal processes.

To Moldova, Georgia, Mozambique, and whichever governments the ship's captain and insurance and the owner hailed from, this was just a tangled minor legal mess a couple thousand kilometers away over a flaky shipping company and some fertilizer. The port of Beirut probably has/had just a handful of people who could work on this and they were also busy being involved in every single other bit of shipping that went through the place all day every day. Every clerk in every country this passed through probably had a job that didn't really involve dealing with this kind of thing on a daily basis, there was no real money in it for anyone, and whoever was sorting it out had to go through like 6 languages and 8 international legal systems.

And every single one of those countries and the international shipping capitalists who actually created the material conditions that caused the blast will blame Lebanon, who ultimately did nothing but have the human decency to offer a safe harbor to a stricken ship at sea. Because their port authority warehoused the cargo that those companies and countries dumped on them.

There's a similar situation in Yemen where the Saudi aggressors have seized an oil/gas tanker a few years ago and it's sitting just offshore a port city waiting to either explode or leak/sink.

88888 posted:

everyone in Lebanon is also doing this

yeah the press is absolutely using this for racist saber rattling and hezbollah smearing nonsense, but lebanese folks are still rightfully pissed that for 6 years people kept pointing out the danger and demanding action be taken to no avail. the papers being assholes doesn't invalidate that

Long [THREAD] on the developing situation in Lebanon following the explosion in Beirut, as the politics and politicisations begin to set in.

— Ibn Riad - ابن رياض (@IbnRiad) August 6, 2020

Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:

Horselord posted:

i don't know if i trust this explosion to be an accident

i trust empire to take advantage of tragic accidents when they do occur

that is true, but it isn't difficult to imagine some mossad dickhead hearing something at a bar near the port and then fucking around

obviously speculation and it doesn't matter now that it's happened. what's important here is macron rolling up and openly threatening Lebanon

kinch posted:

Nasrallah's speech should have just started. He wasn't expected to speak on the matter until after the five-day preliminary investigation, so the next few hours could be interesting.

live stream with english translation: https://www.presstv.com/Live

just caught them wrapping up at the end. seems like he was mostly concerned with condemning media speculation that the blast was somehow hezbollah's fault.